School is for nerds....

I'm listening to John Denver. I need to get out of the city for a weekend. I'm feeling a bit stifled at the moment. But only enough for it to be slightly annoying.

But HOT DAMN! I love school! I haven't really been attending to this blog as of late, so tonight I'm making my first attempt to get you folks caught up with things, starting with the whole story of how I managed to get enrolled in Goldsmiths.

Basically, I talked my way into it. The process for applying to universities here is different from the US. There is one main clearing house type website you do your application on, and they in turn send it to the schools you've chosen. Because I came into the process so late, all I did was complete the application then call the universities directly. Much to my dismay, everyone had already started classes, except for Goldsmiths College, which is one of the twenty or so colleges that make up the University of London. I got an admissions guy on the phone on Thursday, impressed him with my high school AP test scores, went in on Friday to fill out paperwork and get my class schedule, then started school on Monday. Time lapsed from starting my application to starting class: two weeks. Not too shabby. I come to find out later that I really and truly lucked out. I've managed to get a spot in a good school.

So. I'm an English and History student, and I'm taking four classes and go five days a week. Each class consists of one hour of lecture and one hour of seminar. Lectures are obviously where you all go and take notes while an important-sounding professor talks about stuff, then you go to seminar and talk about the lecture in a smaller group. The really rad thing about seminars here versus the discussion groups I had to go to at UCSD is that the seminars are run by the professors, not TAs. The lecturers rotate lecturing responsibility in accordance with what their speciality is. Fan-tastic. And although the school year is broken up into three terms, I'll be in the same four classes for the entire year. Also fan-tastic.

Not so fan-tastic: a majority of my final grade in each class seems to rest on my perfomance on what will certainly be a nasty end-of-year exam-type thingie. Not sure about that....

So. The four classes I am taking are as follows:

1) Explorations in Literature: basically a survey course of the big 'uns in that are part of the literary canon. We started with 'The Odyssey' and end with Margaret Atwood. Along the way are Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Hardy, Woolf, etc etc etc. We basically read one book a week. I'm worried that Milton is going to break me. Dante tried but failed since I'd already read 'The Inferno'. The only really frustrating thing about this class is the lack of time we get to spend on each literary work. Two hours with Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' is just enough to gloss over the main points. I suppose that means that the more detailed analysis is going to come from our essays, but I'm going to miss having the chance to sort of test my essay ideas out on the rest of the class. Oh. I just re-read the syllabus and found out that I've got a three-hour essay test...three hours to write three essays. Oh dear. Well. I'll think about that when it gets closer to exam day.

2) Making of Medieval Europe: at the moment, my favorite class. This is the only class I got to pick. My other two choices were Renaissance history and modern history. I chose medieval because it's the one I know the least about. US schools K-12 spend tons of time on the Renaissance and modern times because that's all America was really around for. So I figured I'd change things up a bit. And boy oh boy, am I glad that I did! Thus far, I have been utterly fascinated with every topic we've covered. I really can't go any more into it, otherwise I'm likely to get lost on some tangent involving secular aristocracy or burial goods or good ol' Charlemagne. I may be starting to dig history more than literature...nah...lit will always be where my heart is...

3) Concepts and Methods in History: this is the tough one. Explorations and Medieval are classes that I would normally associate with literature and history majors...we read and discuss literature in Explorations and we read and discuss history in Medieval. Concepts and Methods as well as the last class are more like big how-tos on being history/literature students. At the moment we're charging through the entirety of recorded human history, focusing on the historians that jotted everything down. So these few weeks have been less about what happened as opposed to who wrote about it, and how they went about doing so. After that it's a few weeks on what constitutes a legitimate historical source, then a few more weeks on the specific approaches to history. Whew. It's some theoretical stuff. The difficulty of getting my brain to think in the way they want me to is compounded by my seminar professor. She's aggressive and confrontational, and although I really enjoy her teaching methods, it really sucks when she decides to fix her stare on you because you've said something stupid. Forces me to really focus on being prepared for class though, which is a good thing...

4) Approaches to Text: last but not least, my "how to read literature like a proper literature student" class. I am very bored with this one. The syllabus leads me to believe that it may pick up later on in the year, but it's really basic stuff right now that I've been doing already for ages. I have to read lots of literary theory stuff, which is sort of interesting, and of the four actual literary works that we're covering, I've only read one. Well, that's not true. I was supposed to read 'Frankenstein', but I got twenty pages into and didn't like it. Same thing with 'The Tempest', which is also on our list for this class. The theory textbooks for this class were expensive.

And there you have it. We're in week seven out of eleven for the first term and I couldn't be happier. I'm meeting new folks, making new friends, and stuffing my head with as much as it can hold. It's been hard to juggle nannying responsibilities with school responsibilities, but I'm starting to get the details of a good routine hammered out.

At any rate, I have to stop typing now because I have to finish up the reading for tomorrow's lecture/seminar. I'm going to try and post more tomorrow evening, but no guarantees....

Buenas noches!